CLARKS: MADE TO LAST: THE STORY OF BRITAIN'S BEST-KNOWN SHOE FIRM BY MARK PALMER (Profile Books £20)

If you ask me how many shoes I own, I would have to admit I haven’t counted them lately. I do know that there are a lot, including a pristine pair of Manolo Blahniks, which I’m still waiting for the opportunity to wear.

This obsession with shoes has its roots in my childhood, and our local shoe-shop, Armitages of Sittingbourne in Kent.

There, the assistant would bring out a special foot-measuring gauge. then vanish into the stock-room and emerge with half-a dozen boxes stamped with the distinctive Clarks logo, each containing a variant on a flat, round-toed, brown leather shoe: lace-ups in winter, buckled sandals in summer.

Goodness, how I loathed those horrors! I used to beg my mother to consider trendier alternatives. But she was having none of it.

I’m grateful now. While my friends complain about the bunions and corns caused by the stylish footwear of their youth, I skip about bunion-free, thanks to Clarks.

Mark Palmer writes in his history of the company that a recent insurance company survey set up to identify the profiles of ‘Mr and Mrs Made It’ found they wear Clarks shoes as well as having lots of holidays.

These days it isn’t just Mr and Mrs Made It who cherish the brand. In China, Clarks is regarded as the last word in chic.

The Clarks brand grew from humble beginnings. Quaker James Clark, born in Street in 1811, had the idea of making sheepskin slippers, known as ‘Brown Petersburgs’.

In 1941 Nathan Clark came up with the idea for the Desert Boot, when he was serving with the Royal Army Service Corps in Egypt and sent back sketches to the family firm in Street, Somerset.

Half a century later, 10 million pairs of desert boots have been sold, the style was nominated by London’s Design Museum as one of ‘50 Shoes that Changed the World’, and the boots became favourites of celebs like Bob Dylan and Robbie Williams.

The remarkable thing is that, with a 188-year history including near-crashes, take-over bids and a vicious 1993 boardroom battle, Clarks is still a family firm.

Like other great 19th-century Quaker businesses, such as the confectioners, Cadbury, the Clarks firm was strongly principled and paternalistic towards its workforce. These family values were reflected in the product: hard-wearing, but not excessively stylish.

Mark Palmer’s history of the firm draws so diligently on the firm’s archives that his readers may feel they know as much about the business as the Clark family themselves.

But if the Clarks story is low on scandal, there are engaging characters to meet. Above all, there are the zillions of people across the centuries who have come to feel - if not love - at least affection and gratitude for their sturdy, if unglamorous, Clarks.